A brief consideration of tells in shoot-em-ups

I was considering the application of "show &" tells to shoot-em-ups the past few days while playing Raiden IV, Mushi-F, and Lightening* Force; the idea that enemies should visually indicate when an attack is about to happen (e.g. Bowser sucking in air before breathing fire). It should be taken into consideration that I have not cleared any of the three games I'm about to discuss, although I'm on the final stages of Raiden IV and Mushi-F. Lightening Force I've played for like 3 hours so take that with a grain of salt.

As I said before, Raiden is so positionally-oriented that precise shot timing doesn't really matter. If there's a group of enemies above me that I know fire single tracking bullets, I also know that I will be safe sweeping left until I clear the bullets. I can start the sweep any time before the first bullet reaches me and end it any time after the last one fires. If there's also an enemy left of me, then I should probably sweep up-right to get away or down-left to get under it and fire. These scenarios are pretty static across runs. Timing doesn't really matter that much - what matters is doing these movements in such a way as to sync up with targets while also setting up the next dodge. Which is quite enough to make it more complicated than "sweep left". I did think it would be helpful on a few enemies who shoot starburst or static patterns - and I also noticed these enemies do have animated tells (e.g. a mine blinking faster before it explodes).

Mushihimesama Futari yeah nah. It's all sight-dodging. I'm looking at the bullets for paths through them, or for enemies under them to shoot and consume them. Also, everything pretty much shoots immediately as it comes on screen and doesn't stop til it's destroyed. Herding is a pretty big deal in situations where aggression fails - essentially, you can treat enemies as though they are firing at all times and this would not significantly change the strategy.

Lightening Force I can definitely see the applicability. Not for bullets so much, but the game is plagued with enemies that blast on screen and smash into you so fast there's barely a second to react. Some of them do have foreshadowing, swooping across the background or burrowing through the desert sand, but not nearly enough. Blazing Star solves this in the simplest way possible, with "incoming" arrows where enemies are about to emerge. Crude, but effective. The bosses desperately need tells for everything they do, because they move around jerkily without pattern and again fire extremely fast bullets without warning. Maybe need is too strong - they'd be altered, for sure. As is, playing it safe and staying completely out of their targeting zone is pretty much the only road to success. The anxious fidgeting makes sure that even that isn't particularly easy.

So yeah, I'm inclined to think something is wrong with Gradius if it would really benefit from visual tells, and I'm starting to question if it actually would. The most troubling factors seem to be malingering enemies like the footbots who hang around for 10 or 20 seconds and can mostly be ignored except for those three random times they shoot, and the crowded spacing that means sustained motions like I described re:Raiden lead to constant collisions (I've said in the past I don't care for walls in shmups). It's like the series carves out a weird space between Thunderforce, where you always have to play it safe, and Mushihimesama, where you always have to wait and see, but without having the elegant level design of Raiden IV which realizes that it's in that space.

*light·en·ing

/ˈlītniNG/

noun

noun: lightening; plural noun: lightenings

1. a drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.

Come on Gradius II, you KNOW I have OCD

I know I said this wasn't going to turn into some kind of Gradius fan-blog, but apparently, it did?

I've been so fucking hung up on Gradius II in the past week, and I don't mean I've played through it like eighteen times, I mean it's taken about five days to complete just five levels.

A little background here - I love shmups. I've probably mentioned that before. They're both a guilty pleasure and a genuine intellectual interest of mine, and I will play (or at least try) just about any.

On the flipside, I suck at shmups. I've never been reflex Johnson, I have no sense of rhythm, I can't learn kinesthetically, and therefore, I'm really bad at replicating, repeating, and improving upon precise inputs. This has a lot of fun widespread implications, like that I can't play instruments or sports, but more importantly, it means I'm almost comically bad at precise action games. Fighting games are the worst (lame, as I also love fighting games), but shmups really hurt too. I'm not trying to paint this like a disability or something, I still have fun. Just suck, and always have to take it with a grain of salt when someone says "this game is hard at first, but after playing for a while it'sa no problemo!"

The complicating factor is that I'm pretty much obsessive compulsive. Maybe I never bothered to whine at a doctor, but how many people do you know who wash their feet every time they touch the floor? This mental defliction has a twofold application to shmups: first, I play every game (shmup or otherwise) on Normal difficulty the first time through, no matter what. I will never turn the difficulty down to Easy unless I have some kind of ulterior motive (like if I'm trying to get video of Easy mode... I'm not that crazy). Second is that I can't stand using continues/lives beyond the initial supply (i.e. "inserting credits"). I literally can't have fun if I'm using difficulty crutches - my brain won't allow me. But I also suck. So what you get is that I just don't finish a lot of shmups.

Man what was the point of this post. I wrote that title/opening a few weeks ago and now I honestly have no idea where I was going with it. Or if I was going anywhere. There has to have been some specific way I was going to tie it to Gradius II. 

I think it's that I broke my rule about no continues because Gradius II is really hard but also has well-contained levels that don't really bow down to a full set of power-ups, so you may as well play each one as an individual game. Not to mention that my degrading quality of play over the course of a session would mean that after about an hour, I would be losing on Stage 1 about 75% of the time, and therefore was spending the lion's share of my playtime on... Stage 1. Which I knew I could beat. But because I broke my rule, I had to make a trade, which was that I would beat a level every time I sit down to play. If I'm gonna continue infinitely, then I need to force progress somehow, such that I don't sit down to the exact same level every time I play (again, boring). And I really wanted to beat the game. So I've gotten into these long sessions that drag on endlessly because my best few attempts come at the beginning and then my concentration fades and I start having a lot of stupid deaths, but I insist on continuing because the idea of stopping is too frustrating to even consider. 

So then there was a pure memorization level, and my patience was really put to the test. And in the end, I gave up. And guess what? I haven't played Gradius II since. That's what happens when you break your promises. That's why you never get out of the tree.

Not the Gradius you thought it was

It's nowhere near a big deal, but even I'm getting confused by our mixture of multi-regional names for Gradius/Nemesis games. Reading the intro of Greg L's Spaceman Beau post, I couldn't figure out what specifically he meant by the "Gradius knockoff", Nemesis, as Nemesis is Gradius. There were MSX-only sequels named Nemesis 2 and Nemesis 3, but were those originally intended as a series, or only linked by name? We're about to learn.

Nemesis (GB) is pretty by early Game Boy standards, even featuring some parallax scrolling

So here comes a reference guide to all early (pre-1991) Gradius/Nemesis games with their regional/platform-specific titles, listed chronologically. Obviously Japan got all of the games in all of their forms, Europe mostly saw arcade and MSX titles, and North America got arcade and Nintendo-console entries. The only platforms I'm listing exhaustively are those that had an original entry: Arcade, NES, MSX, SNES, PC-Engine (Turbo-Grafx), and Game Boy. There are other ports out there (for Windows, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, so forth), but they all follow in line with major releases according to region. Note that the Game Boy Nemesis games are not ports of the MSX titles, hence their separate listing. After 1991, all regions got the same games under the same titles (all tagged with "Gradius"), so there's no sense in listing them here.

Japanese Title	European Title	North American Title
Gradius (Arc/NES); Nemesis (MSX)	Nemesis (MSX/Arc)	Nemesis (Arc), Gradius (NES)
Salamander (Arc/MSX/NES)	Salamander (Arc/MSX/NES)	Life Force (Arc/NES)
Gradius 2 (MSX)*	Nemesis 2 (MSX)	--
Gradius II (Arc/NES/PCE)	Vulcan Venture (Arc)	--
Gofer no Yabo Episode II (MSX)	Nemesis 3 (MSX)	--
Gradius III (Arc/SNES)	--	Gradius III (Arc/SNES)
Nemesis (GB)	Nemesis (GB)	Nemesis (GB)
Nemesis II (GB)	Nemesis II (GB)	Gradius: Interstellar Assault

*released as Nemesis '90 Kai on Sharp X8600

By looking at Japan's list, we can see the clear lineage of the pre-'91 series: four major arcade games, two MSX spinoffs, and two independent Game Boy releases. Japan was the only audience to get all three pure Gradiuses (I, II, and III). We can also observe from this column that the only games originally designated "Nemesis" are those on Game Boy.

The second column makes it clear that Europe would certainly know this as the Nemesis series, not Gradius. Oddly, their main line was repurposed and renamed from a hodgepodge of unrelated spinoffs. Aside from the ostensibly unrelated arcade release Vulcan Venture, Europe never got a proper follow-up to the original Gradius/Nemesis.

The MSX had some bright colors, but its rendition of Vic Viper is as primitive as they come

North America got the fewest games of any region, though that's really just due to the absence of MSX releases. With the exception of Gradius II, the main arcade entries and their Nintendo ports all made it over here. As such, the American perspective at the time would probably hold that Nemesis was nothing more than a standalone Gradius-like handheld game. 

What we've learned here is that there really is no such thing as a Nemesis game, except on Game Boy. Everything else was originally designed and designated as an MSX incarnation of Gradius, only to be retitled in Europe.

Sorry, I realize this post was little more than a synthesis of data culled entirely from Wikipedia and MobyGames. That's life in the big city. Have a happy weekend!

also what is this blog like gradius jr. these days? we really need new subject matter

Konami ReBirth, followed swiftly by Konami ReDeath

Around 2009, classic-style 2D gaming was at a height it hadn't reached for over a decade. Retro series were showing a second life with Street Fighter IV, Mega Man 9, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and... um... Sonic 4. The time was ripe for Konami, action kings of the early '90s, to rise like a phoenix and show the world what hardcore gaming really meant. Few classics are as beloved as Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania, but the former two hadn't seen a commercially successful sequel in fifteen years, and the Castlevania property had completely abandoned its origins. Konami smartly chose this opportunity to capitalize on a "ReBirth" for all three series, combining retro stylings with brand new content. That was the only smart decision they made in the entire process, because...

What the hell are these games? If anything the three seem to form a contained "ReBirth" subseries rather than a systemic overhaul or continuation of their respective properties. I honestly can't tell if Konami intended to continue Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania so much as they wanted to launch a new "ReBirth" branding that would visit random classics with its trappings. The decision to use the same developer, same assets, and same art-style for all three games is beyond lame. Why are Contra and Castlevania suddenly only distinguished by palette? Think of how different Contra III and Super Castlevania IV look. It all reeks of trying to budget three games for the price of one. Could Konami possibly have conceived anything more throwaway and forgettable? Raise your hand if today, a mere four years later, you even remember the ReBirths.

The games look passable, but the unfaithful pixel art calls to mind "cell-phone game" more than "NES"

I cannot stress enough how mind-boggling short-sighted this approach was. All we have to look at is the ReBirth visual presentation to know that Konami fundamentally misunderstood what was making Capcom, Nintendo, and Sega so successful at rebooting old properties. My best shot at what was going through their minds is: "well it looks like people are willing to buy cheap old games with any graphics at all, so let's make some cheap games with old mechanics and crappy graphics". It's like it completely went over their heads that Mega Man 9 was cool for identically replicating NES graphics, or that A Boy and His Blob had intricate modern hand-drawn sprites, or that Sonic 4 brought Sonic into a lush HD revision of his classic 16-bit hangouts. There's a common denominator here - the games either go FULL retro, or they go FULL contemporary. Konami tried to forge some fanciful middle ground by opting for the sorta-retro look of recent indie games like Cave Story and Super Meat Boy: pixelated sprite art that doesn't match with any particular generation of hardware. This works for indie games attempting to evoke the general spirit of classic gaming rather than any particular era, but it has no place in fucking Castlevania. Clearly Konami didn't want to spend the cash to get a real development studio to produce Donkey Kong Country Returns-level graphics, but were also scared the public wouldn't accept throwback art. This in spite of plentiful examples that both approaches pay off.

If they were so fucking scared of retro graphics, why settle for such tired gameplay? These three games show no attempt at all at advancing or even slightly varying the mechanics of their predecessors. Gradius ReBirth kinda gets away with it, because Gradius never had any variety, but all of the classic Contra and Castlevania games played slightly differently. Instead of offering a new variation, ReBirth falls back on the most stripped-down set of mechanics. So these aren't really sequels at all. I'd accept this if we were doing a "pretend it's 1988" time-shift, but the visuals have already destroyed that illusion. If Konami was so sure they could improve on classic sprite-art, why be so conservative in the gameplay department? Pick a sandbox to play in! Again, there's a very simple explanation for this: they did the cheapest thing possible. It's like they were immensely reluctant to make these games, like they had already assumed they weren't going to make any money. I wonder if Koko does make any money these days?

Gradius ReBirth is the only one that even close to fits into its series - only because Gradius always took a step back for every step it took forward. Yes, I am referring to Edit Mode. Bring it fucking back you assholes.

I'm directing my ire at Konami higher-ups because it doesn't seem fair to come down hard on development studio M2. M2 should never have been chosen for all three of these games. They can obviously construct decent (if a bit unbalanced) action, and were these games not burdened with the responsibility of carrying on some of the greatest legacies in gaming history, they'd be fairly recommendable (and still are). But these guys had nowhere near the panache and versatility to turn out what needed to be three completely distinct entries of three completely distinct series under limited time and budget. Yes, I realize that the original Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania shared quite a bit of staff, but it must be noted that before ReBirth, M2 had only been responsible for collating and porting Sega and Konami classics to other platforms. These were the first three games they had ever developed (at least the first three they're ever credited for developing), and the early-90s Konami Dream Team they are not. Besides, I doubt they were getting much financial support. These weren't exactly headline releases - though of course they should've been.

What bothers me about the ReBirth games is less their immediate quality; rather it's what a terrible stepping stone they provide for their brands. Why rebirth your series if you can't/won't build off of that rebirth at all? There is simply nowhere to follow from ReBirth. They didn't invent any new series standards; they weakly perpetuated old conventions. What was Konami's plan for ReBirth Phase 2? More watered-down semi-remakes? Did they think that's what people wanted of the series going forward? Or were they planning a return to true classic-style Contra/Gradius/Castlevania games? In that case, why bother with the ReBirth detour at all? It was a cheap way to quickly grab and then immediately lose gamers' attention. If anything, it tarnished the name of all three properties and showed the gaming public that Konami just doesn't give a shit about its classic stable. Is it even remotely surprising that in the wake of ReBirth, Contra and Gradius once again dropped off the map and Castlevania moved directly into another reboot?

God I hate that they made Contra look like a Saturday-morning cartoon. Contra should be M-rated as fuck. At least they threw in an Escape from New York reference.

ReBirth is a cautionary example that tagging something as "retro" isn't enough to make it successful, even if it's paired with fan-favorite brands. Developers need to have actual vision that they can communicate to the player. Allow me a brief fantasy of what ReBirth could have been, had Konami assigned an actual brain to the project. Start with a wave of 8-bit Mega Man 9-style direct sequels, move up to 16-bit for a second wave, and so forth until landing on the most repeatable formula or making a jump to present-day visuals/gameplay. That is to say, it could have been an actual rebirth, leading into regrowth, leading into profit and good games all around. Thanx God this is what we got instead.

What I'm Playing, Junely '13

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

It's pronounced "june-LYE". Because once again we're stuck between months, because I forgot when something ended and then a whole week passed and then it was like oh no my life is flashing before my eyes. It's summer, so new games aren't coming out, especially because a new console generation is on the horizon, but it's not like new games ever stopped me before.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

Despite Capcom having released up to as many as like I dunno I think six Mega Men on 3DS Virtual Console, only ONE of those is from the Game Boy Mega Man series (which itself contained five unique games). Because this is Capcom we're talking about, so they need to milk stuff they've already released - you know, those NES Mega Man games that were already re-released as a collection on GCN and PS2, then re-re-released on Wii Virtual Console? Where the hell are the fucking Game Boy Mega Mans?! Don't you worry, because I wrote on my Wily's Revenge post-play survey at Club Nintendo that if Nintendo doesn't get on Capcom to release these games, something bad is going to happen. Yes I fill out those surveys. You get 10 coins for it! That's like 1/10th of a free game!

Anyway. Wily's Revenge. Considering that the original NES series teetered on the brink of tolerability, often slipping into shit (MM1 and MM3 in particular), you'd worry that a Game Boy entry would certainly fall on the crap side. I know I did. Surprisingly, though it may be a bit tame, Wily's Revenge is awfully competent and occasionally even surpasses its console brothers with smart design twists. In particular it displays my favorite use of fuzzy blocks to date (to be elucidated in a later article) and one of the cooler boss weapons up to this point in the series, Enker's Reflecto-Shield. The game is short and the levels largely in the class of easy forgettability recognizable from MM1's Bomb and Cut Man stages, but it's a fun taste of Mega Man worthy of a look from fans.

Games Started:

Bad Bots (PC/Steam)

More like Bad Game! Eh, that was a cheap shot. Plus it's not a bad game. So double cheapshot. Basically I'm an asshole. Bad Bots was a relatively minor indie release on Steam that probably isn't benefiting from the hovering Metacritic average of fucking 40-something. It's not exactly innovative, but something this competently made by such a small (single-man) team at a low price-point hardly deserves that kind of derision. It's fun, it's unique to look at, it offers enough linear progression to distinguish itself from the litany of free Flash/mobile games out there, and it's fucking fun. Sorry if side-scrolling twin-stick shooters aren't en vogue anymore - anyone who likes them is sure to like Bad Bots. As is anyone who likes heavily saturated pulp-style scifi artwork. It's definitely not a must-buy, but the demo is worth a try, and if developers like Point 5 saw the same kind of cash flow as garbage-brains like Twisted Pixel and Team Meat, we'd have a much more colorful indie marketplace. Normally I'd complain that the writing is embarrassingly terrible, but it'd be kinda hard for the sole writer - who isn't a native English speaker - to be too embarrassed by his script.

Minecraft: Xbox Edition (what platform do you think?)

Never before has a game pioneered so quickly going from so addictively fun to so forgettably boring. Come on spell-check, your suggested corrections for "forgettably" are "forgettable" and "unforgettably"? How can those both be in the dictionary but "forgettably" isn't? What a mad, mad world we live in. This is like the time I killed that kid.

I'm exaggerating of course. He survived with fourth degree burns covering most of his body. But Minecraft certainly has the fun dynamic of like... those Flash games I played in the student center to kill free periods in high school. Kinda tedious at first, then it gets exciting, then it's just plain awesome, then around the three hour mark it's completely peaked and I move on. What was that one? Defend Your Castle or something? Minecarp is Defend Your Castle for a new generation. A generation where that is by far the most profitable business model in gaming. Could it at least have fucking quests or something? Why not just play with Legos?

See, I'm like a steelworker: I kill what I eat. See, I'm like a hunter gatherer: I kill what I eat. See, I'm like a bricklayer: I kill what I eat. See, see, I'm like a murderer: I kill what I eat. That's my description of Minecraft, and/or the lyrics to "Steelworker". Your call.

Mysterious Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer (SNES)

Broooooooooooooo! Or is he???

If there's one thing I sometimes do, it's follow through on my promises here on this blog. So I played a bit'o roguelike in Chunsoft's original Shiren the Wanderer. Surprisingly, the game is damn fun - there's a gratifying responsiveness to the turn-based real-time action, the randomized floors are just the right size to feel unique but not labyrinthine, and the action comes fast and furious. Tying it all together of course is that one-death-ends-it-all tension that makes every rare reward feel even rarer. Unfortunately, I've now died so many times that I have a hard time reveling in any particular treasure, knowing that just around the corner some random-ass trap is probably gonna take it away from me.

Gradius II: Gofer's Ambition (Turbo-Grafx 16)

Konami riffing on Alien? I refuse to believe it!

The history of Gradius II is a bit odd - I'd actually like to do a feature comparing the NES and Arcade iterations of the game, as they're so completely different that they're essentially different games. What Japan got on the Turbo-Grafx (the US didn't get the game at all) is supposedly a pretty direct arcade port, one that will feel suspiciously familiar to any veteran of Gradius III. While II may lack III's coolest upgrade over the original (and the rest of the series), the customizable weapon sets, it otherwise parallels its graphics, music, and gameplay mechanics. Where the two differ is that Gradius II is really fucking hard. Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but after a few weeks with the game and dozens of runs, I can barely get through level 3. By comparison, I could beat the first five stages of Gradius III basically just by looking at them. II is almost like the Lost Levels of this series. 

Games Finished:

Saints Row The Third (Xbox 360)

Play through all two alternate endings! Experience morality choices like you could never dreamed was true! Man the ending of this game was dumb as hell. I was just excited that they finally gave me the chance to let a member of my "crew" die. Of course the game tried to make that feel super morally ambiguous or something and was all like "AH HOPE IT WAS WERT IT, DAWG", and I was like, hell yeah it was. That bitch was a stupid bitch. She did nothing but bitch and moan the entire game. She extremely deserved to die.

The climactic battle against the main villain is immensely unfun and ill-conceived. See, he's a luchadore, so the only way to defeat him is quick-time events. That's what I said. It's not like it was hard, but I was pretty pissed when the game glitched out and left me wandering around the ring for ten minutes mashing the attack button and thinking I was making progress, only to learn (after giving up and going online) that a QTE had failed to trigger and I had to reload my last save file. Weirdly (or thankfully), this battle isn't the end of the game, being followed by two 'cooldown' missions determined by the aforementioned moral choice. The better of the two sees the player take to Mars for one final confrontation with the villain (hmm... wonder if Volition reused their Mars assets from the Red Faction series...).

My final takeaway from this game: about halfway through, there was a zombie mission, and I thought to myself: for all the mayhem this game touts, how come there's no chainsaw melee weapon? Then at the end of the game, you do get a chainsaw. So good on 'em for including the chainsaw, but a little too late, no?

The only song ever made

Prelude to a Top Ten: Mommy, what's a platformer? revisited

Even if it is one of the oldest genres in gaming, platformer is still not acknowledged as a word by spell-check. That's what I'm here to talk about today. What is a platformer? Well, not really, because that's kind of boring. But since I'm going to be listing my ten favorites, I better establish a definition and some criteria so you can figure out what I'm talking about. A lot of the Cracked.coms and the GameFAQss of the world simply start counting off the numbers with little more introduction than "welcome to my Top Ten [if you're the fifth caller or any caller at all]".

A platformer is a game in which the primary novel interactive element is platforming. That is to say, the game engages the player by evolving and varying its platforming. Your first reaction to that ought to be "you used the word 'platforming' a whole lot of times in defining 'platformer'". That's because it's important to establish the game type beyond the play type. Many games contain platforming but are not platformers. Take for example Metroid or Contra. They're both full of jumping about, yet it's a constant; Metroid progresses via exploration and Contra through more threatening enemies.

Few would argue that Sting is a platformer

Yes, jumping about. Our heroes simply can't get enough of it, as their heroes before them, as Shakespeare before them. The A button has become nearly synonymous with "jump". Yet somehow, not all platformers depend on or even include this frog-like tendency. Platforming can't be defined as jumping, because that's a terrible description, plus it would exclude Bionic Commando, VVVVV, and H.E.R.O. It's more primal than that. Platforming is play which challenges the player to navigate an avatar in opposition of omnipresent forces. The omnipresentest of these forces are familiar to us from the physical world: gravity, inertia, and friction. The character is dragged toward the bottom of the screen, has a tendency to continue moving when initiated, and can't move through objects. Others are tossed in from time to time: wind, rain, and the like.

If you're not getting it, maybe you're a musical learner, or a kinesthetic. Try singing the last paragraph or shaking your monitor up and down, as it may suit your developmental disability. If you're a "by examples" learner, allow me to show you two games. One is a platformer and other is not. If you can, I recommend you go play these games to see exactly what I mean, because videos aren't the best control demos. On the left you have Gradius. Notice that in Gradius, when the player uses the control pad to move Vic Viper, it moves exactly in the direction you press, for the duration that you press it. Then it stops. No external forces are moving it, and navigation is not inherently a challenge. On the right is our old friend and loved one, Sonic the Hedgehog. Notice that Sonic falls from the sky, slides down hills, and generally does all kinds of stuff, even when the player drops the controller. Sonic is a platformer/hedgehog.

Note that, while I've been focusing on 2D examples here, just about everything I've said applies in 3D land as well. Also keep in mind that plenty of games do not cleanly fall into one category or another. While Sonic, Mario, and Pitfall are obviously platformers, what about Mega Man, Kid Icarus, or Pitfall 2? These games rotate between play-styles and develop their platforming alongside other major play elements. Nothing to fear though! A little genre-mixing never stopped Elton John!

That ought to be enough to chew on for now, I'll be back later today or tomorrow with today's Ten Top Boppers.